A first assessment of development processes with respect to product lines and component based development

Abstract

One important line of research in the application of product-line approaches to the industrial field is the creation and adaptation of already known development processes to hold the activities required to build families of products, based on the usage of components. There are different development models in the literature, but each of them focus on a specific technique or approach, so in order to create an effective development process suited for that purpose, several of them must be joint. This article reviews a well-known development process, and evaluates it in the light of product lines development and also the creation and usage of components. This is achieved by comparison with other four processes, specially tailored to those activities. This is the starting activity of a larger effort driven towards the definition of a general development process, able to apply the best practices known to the creation of product lines with components.